This was the hardest week to write, because some of the answers involve all of us. It runs from Juneteenth through the day before we left for Montana: nine entries on how accountability eroded across both parties, on the people I love who see this differently, on why a broken system is not a reason to disengage, and on the practical things anyone can do. Days 15 through 23.
June 18: Why it keeps getting worse
I have been thinking about why it keeps getting worse, and I keep arriving at the same uncomfortable answer: because the consequences kept being insufficient. And I want to be honest about something. That is not a Republican problem or a Democratic problem. It is an American one.
A Democratic administration prosecuted Vietnam through deception. The Gulf of Tonkin justification was fabricated. Hundreds of thousands died. No one was held accountable. Reagan’s administration had 138 people investigated, indicted, or convicted for Iran-Contra, secretly selling weapons to Iran in direct violation of a congressional ban. Most walked. Clinton used military force without congressional authorization and left office pardoning a fugitive financier whose ex-wife had donated heavily to Democratic causes. The pardons were legal. They were also a fairly clear message about who the rules apply to. George W. Bush authorized torture and started a war on intelligence that was, at best, wrong. No accountability followed. Obama prosecuted more whistleblowers than all previous presidents combined while the surveillance state expanded quietly and legally.
And then the Trump years. Two impeachments, an acquittal, an insurrection, 1,500 pardons on day one of the second term, and a second term moving faster and further with less resistance than the first.
The pattern is not partisan. It is what happens when accountability is optional. Each time the cost stayed manageable, the next person pushed further. Across both parties. Across decades. I watched most of this happen and told myself the system would hold. I was part of the problem I am describing. The correction, if there is one, starts with being honest about it all.
June 19: Juneteenth
Today is Juneteenth. The day in 1865 when enslaved people in Texas finally received word that they were free, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Two and a half years. Because freedom declared is not the same as freedom delivered. Because the distance between what a country says and what it actually does has always been the place where the hardest work lives.
I have been sitting with that gap for months. The words carved into marble versus the policies written in real time. The ideals the founders articulated, imperfectly, incompletely, in many cases hypocritically, and what it has taken, generation after generation, to bend the country even slightly closer to actually meaning them.
This country's history is not a straight line upward. It is a series of expansions and contractions. Progress and resistance to progress. And every generation that produced the expansions did so because enough people refused to accept the contraction as permanent. I grew up believing the expansions were inevitable. I do not believe that anymore. I believe they are chosen. And I believe that right now, in this contraction, the choosing is up to us. On Juneteenth of all days, that feels important to say.
June 20: To the people I love who see this differently
I have people in my life I love deeply who see this very differently than I do. I am not writing this series for them to change their minds. I am writing it because I think we have stopped talking to each other honestly, and I think that silence, on all sides, is part of how we got here. So let me say something directly, not as an argument but as an observation I think is worth sitting with.
When the Supreme Court struck down the tariffs as unconstitutional, that was not a liberal court. It is the most conservative Supreme Court in a generation. When Chief Justice Roberts released a statement rebuking attacks on judicial independence, he was not doing it as a Democrat. He was doing it as someone who has spent his entire career as a conservative jurist, because he understood that an independent judiciary protects everyone, including conservatives, from whoever happens to be in power. When courts ruled that American citizens had been deported without due process, they were not making a political statement. They were applying the Fifth Amendment. The same amendment that protects you.
I genuinely believe you can support lower taxes, strong borders, less government regulation, and a strong military, and still be troubled by these things. Not because I am asking you to become someone different. But because the framework that allows any of us to live under consistent, predictable law is not a liberal idea or a conservative one. It is the whole architecture. It belongs to all of us equally. If it goes, the arguments we care about, on both sides, become meaningless. Because there is no stable ground left to have them on.
That is what I am thinking about today. Not as your opponent. As someone who shares a country with you and wants it to work.
June 21: The 90 million
I have complicated feelings about the 90 million people who did not vote in 2024, because I understand the impulse even while I grieve the result. I understand exhaustion. I understand cynicism. I understand feeling like the choices are bad and the system is broken, and your one vote disappears into something too large to affect. I have felt all of those things.
But the margin was 2.3 million. Swing states decided by less than one percent. 90 million people made a decision. They just did not know they were making one. And I was not loud enough about that. I was not loud enough about any of it. I had the same faith in collective wisdom that turned out to be misplaced, and I did not push back against the current with enough force to matter.
I am not writing this to assign blame to anyone else. I am writing it because I think the honest accounting of how we got here has to include my own choices. My own silences. My own optimism that turned out to be something closer to avoidance. We are all in this. Including the people who chose not to participate. Including me, who participated too quietly for too long.
June 22: The system is broken. Engage anyway.
The system is broken. I want to say that clearly because I think it is true, and I think dismissing the frustration does more harm than good. Primaries controlled by the most extreme slice of each party. Maps drawn by politicians who benefit from drawing them. Money flowing in volumes that would have horrified the founders, toward whoever is most willing to serve its interests. The cynicism has a legitimate basis. I share it.
But I have come to believe that the broken system is a reason to engage differently, not a reason to disengage entirely. Because the same reforms that cannot get through Congress have passed in red states, blue states, and purple states when citizens put them directly on the ballot. Ranked-choice voting. Independent redistricting. Campaign finance reform. These reforms do not need Congress. They need citizens willing to put them on the ballot and vote yes. That is a different ask than waiting for the people who broke the system to fix it. It is harder in some ways and more direct in others. It requires showing up in local elections, off-year races, and ballot initiatives that most people scroll past.
I used the broken system as a reason to stay quieter than I should have. I am not doing that anymore. A broken system is not a reason to disengage. It is a reason to find the door the politicians forgot to lock.
June 23: What actually changes minds
I want to tell you what actually changes minds. Not what we hope changes minds. What the research consistently shows actually does it. It is not a well-argued post. It is not a devastating statistic. It is not a march, though marches matter for other reasons. It is a conversation. A personal one. Between two people who trust each other enough to stay in the room when it gets uncomfortable.
I have been thinking about a conversation I had a few years ago with someone I care about who sees things very differently than I do. I did not go in trying to convince them of anything. I was just honest about how I felt and what I was afraid of. And they were honest back. We did not end up agreeing. But something shifted. Not their position, exactly. Just the temperature of it. The way they held it. That is more than most arguments ever accomplish.
The research on political persuasion is humbling if you believe, as I used to, that the right information delivered clearly enough will move people. It mostly does not work that way. What works is relationship. Sustained, honest, personal contact with someone who sees things differently and is still recognizably human to you. Over time. Without an agenda. I am not good at this. I find it easier to post into the void than to sit across from someone I love and say: I am scared about what is happening; are you? I am working on it.
Here's what I have come to understand after 19 days of writing this series. The posts matter less than the conversations they start. The sign matters less than what you say to the person standing next to you holding one. The march matters less than what you do on a Tuesday in November when nobody is watching. The most powerful civic tool any of us has is a real conversation with someone we actually know. Have one this week. It does not have to be about politics. It just has to be honest.
June 24: Three weeks
This week was the hardest one to write. The escalation that happens when no one is held accountable. The memory that softens when urgency becomes history. My own silence in the middle of all of it, and what I think that silence cost.
I keep coming back to something simple. Every generation gets asked. Not in a grand, dramatic way. Just quietly, in the daily choices, whether to show up or stay home, whether to say something or scroll past, whether to love this country in the easy way or the honest one. We are being asked right now. One week left. July 4th is right there. And I think the last week will be the best one.
June 25: Patriotism is not obedience
Patriotism is not obedience. I want to say that clearly because I think it has been confused for so long that the confusion has started to feel like the truth. And I know, from the inside, how that confusion works. For a long time, I told myself that staying quiet was a kind of respect. I told myself that not making people uncomfortable was a form of decency. That there was something presumptuous about assuming my voice mattered enough to use. That was not humility. It was avoidance dressed up as humility. And I think a lot of us have been living there.
The founders were not asking for our politeness. They were not asking for our compliance. They built a system that assumed citizens would push back. That assumed the governed would hold the government accountable. That assumed people would argue and dissent and demand and show up, not as an inconvenience to the system, but as the system itself working correctly.
Real patriotism is not comfortable. It does not look like a flag on the porch or a hand over the heart, though those things are fine. It looks like the inconvenient version of caring. The showing up when you would rather not. Saying something when silence would be so much easier. I have been the quiet version of a patriot for too long. These last three weeks have been me trying to be a different kind.
June 26: The practical
I am going to spend today on the practical, because I have spent enough of this series on the feeling of it, and I want to end somewhere useful.
Check your voter registration. Not before the next election- now. Voter rolls are purged regularly without notice. It takes four minutes. Then text the link to three people. Not a political text. Just: Are you registered? Four minutes.
Call your representatives. Not email, call. Legislative offices count constituent calls. They are logged and reported. One phone call from a constituent carries more weight than a hundred online signatures. Say your name, your city, and what you want them to do. Thirty seconds. Leave a voicemail if you need to.
Vote in the 2026 midterms. Every House seat is up. A third of the Senate. Midterms are decided by the people who show up, usually about 35% of eligible voters. Your individual vote carries more weight than it does in a presidential year.
Bring one person. Not to convince them of anything. Just to the polls. A personal ask from someone you know is the most powerful get-out-the-vote tool that exists. More effective than any campaign ad or any post, including this one.
I should have been saying these things louder and sooner. I am saying them now. Check your registration at vote.gov. Find your representatives at congress.gov.
The last week is the road to Montana. That’s next.
— Patrick